No Welcome For War Criminals!
Barack ‘The Bomber’ Obama is in Dublin today to be conferred with the Freedom of the City - but we say NO WELCOME FOR WAR CRIMINALS!
Obama was ironically conferred with another prestigious reward in 2009 - the Nobel Peace Price. Norwegian Nobel Committee saw fit to give this award to the first Black President of the United States due to “Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons”. Obama would go on to sanction more drone strikes in his first year in office than George W Bush carried out during the entirety of his two terms as United States President.
This alleged peacemaker, just like his predecessors, is an international war criminal responsible for untold suffering in Palestine, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere. This is in addition to his enthusiastic political and financial support for the Apartheid state of Israel. In 2016 Obama agreed to sign a military aid package for Israel worth $38 billion, further emboldening the Apartheid state in their genocidal, expansionist mission to eradicate the people of Palestine from the face of the earth.
Carrying on the legacy of his forbears in engaging in illegal wars and killing innocent civilians without remorse, Obama sanctioned 563 drone strikes during his presidency, resulting in the deaths of approximately 3,797 people. Obama sanctioned 54 drone strikes in Pakistan in just his first year in office, the first and most heinous of which killed 41 Pakistani civilians at funeral. In his second year, Obama sanctioned 128 drone strikes in Pakistan, killing at least 89 civilians.
At this stage it was clear to many that the “HOPE” Obama offered during his 2008 presidential campaign was nothing more than an empty slogan, and that ‘business’ would continue as usual. Obama’s drone strike operations extended to Somalia and Yemen in 2010 and 2011, with the first strike on the latter killing 55 people, including 21 children and 12 women, five of whom were pregnant.
The US, in cooperation with its allies including the Afghan government, killed an average of 582 civilians annually from 2007 to 2016. In 2016 alone, the Obama regime dropped 26,171 bombs (drone or otherwise) on seven countries: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.
In his self-aggrandising memoir “A Promised Land”, published in 2020, Obama defended his campaign of drone strikes through a sort of messiah complex, writing:
“I wanted somehow to save them … And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.”
Obama would have you believe he simply wanted to save the people he murdered, but in reality he consciously decided the fates of thousands of peoples lives, without due process.
But what really cements Obama’s status as a war criminal was his approval of ‘double-tap’ drone strikes. Double-tap drone strikes are as disturbing as they sound. These type of attacks are follow-up strikes on first responders as they rush to assist survivors in the aftermath of the initial drone strike. These attacks are both morally and legally reprehensible, as they are conscious acts of murder against civilians, including healthcare workers.
This practice flies in the face of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, ratified by the United Nations, which explicitly gives protection for not only the wounded, but also for medical and religious personnel, medical units, and medical transports.
Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court states that “Intentionally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping mission in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations” is a war crime. This article further states that “intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians” constitutes a war crime.
There is no doubt about it, Barack Obama is a war criminal, and for Dublin City Council to award such an individual with the Freedom of the City is an insult to all who call Dublin home. NO WELCOME FOR WAR CRIMINALS!